Traditionally, when a customer experiences issues associated with a company's product, such as a computing device or software associated with the computing device, the customer must contact the company's technical support or servicing department. After receiving notification of an issue with the product, the company will dispatched a service agent to call, connect or visit the customer's site and service the product. In some circumstances, the company will have service agents visit a customer's site on a periodic basis to perform scheduled maintenance and resolve any issues. However, this traditional method of providing maintenance and service products has proven to be costly and inefficient.
Many companies have therefore implemented systems, such as “dial home systems”, wherein client devices are constantly monitored for health and functionality. When an event requiring serving occurs, the system automatically notifies a service agent and transfers preliminary critical diagnostic data associated with the client device. By obtaining information in this way, the service agent can quickly identify problems and develop an action plan for problem resolution giving the client a more effective first contact support session and ultimately, an overall reduction in time to resolution.
However, there are drawbacks to such “dial home systems”. In some cases, a client device may generate a false positive event that indicates that servicing may be required even though servicing may not be needed. For example, an anti-virus software running on a client's computer may detect a file as being infected with a virus, when in fact the file is not infected with the virus. Dealing with such false positive events can lead to wastage of time and resources for a company. Currently, when a “dial home” or a notification of the event is generated, there is no way to determine if the event indicates a legitimate issue where servicing for a product is needed or if the event is a false positive event before the notification is forwarded to a service agent. It is only after the service agent receives the notification and analyzes the event, that a determination as to the legitimacy of the need to service the product is made.
Companies have tried manage the occurrence of false positive events in several different ways. For example, if the event is determined to be a false positive event, the service agent may then create a knowledge base article to refer for future instances of same problem. However, false positive events will keep generating notifications that are forwarded to service agents to mark as false positive. In another example, the service agent may also engineer release a patch to correct the generation of the particular false positive event. However, engineering patches for each false positive event is costly and timely. In other circumstances, some dial home systems may disable particular dial home events on the fly so that false positives of the specified events can be avoided. However, the system may also disable genuine dial homes for the specified event. Each of these solutions for managing false positive events requires downtime to troubleshoot the system entity which generated dial home event.
The inventors have discovered that a system and method for detecting and managing false positive events prior to the false positive events being forwarded to a service agent is needed.